ByStephen Mills | March 27, 2017

MONTPELIER — Capitol Grounds is planning a new campaign to market its coffee brands, using the Green Mountain State’s signature 802 area code. It is another branding move that has marked the ascent of the popular Capital City café since it opened on State Street in 1998. Its location in two different buildings over the years has become a favorite of many as a place to pause, sip coffee, eat lunch, peruse work by local artists and purchase coffee by the pound. As the popularity of the café has grown, so has demand for products that include its coffees, T-shirts, hats and mugs, which will also embrace the 802 Coffee campaign. Its most recent offering, Bernie’s Beans, has been a runaway success, with packages of coffee featuring the Vermont senator’s unmistakable visage.

ByStephen Mills | March 27, 2017

If you’re gay, Vermont is the place to stay. Leaders of the Vermont Gay Tourism Association acknowledge that Vermont’s historic civil unions bill put the state on the map as a destination for members of the LGBTQ community. In fact, it was the civil unions bill signed by former Gov. Howard Dean in 2000 that led to the formation of the VGTA, which currently boasts a membership of 60 organizations. They represent a broad swathe of the tourism industry that includes lodging, dining, wedding services, shopping, recreation, travel, the brewing and wine industry and business. The organization plans to reach out to the agriculture and manufacturing sectors to increase membership and broaden its offerings.

MORRISVILLE — If “All the world’s a stage,” Melissa Jordan is the homebody version. As a home stager, Jordan’s forté is her ability to help a homeowner transform a home from mundane to impressive. She specializes in helping home sellers temporarily refine the interior and exterior spaces of a home to make it more inviting and attractive. “Things that help to make a home more appealing include simplifying and coordinating room content, rearranging furniture, adding specific decorative features, using lighting accents, and furnishing empty homes to make them feel warm and inviting,” said Jordan. “Every choice the home stager makes is designed to highlight selling features of the home.

Staff writer BERLIN — Patients seeking one-stop shopping for treatment of an array of muscular and skeletal health issues need look no further than the new Central Vermont Medical Center Orthopedic Center. Situated in an office complex (next to Vermont Lottery) on the Barre-Montpelier Road, a ribbon-cutting ceremony last week finally called attention to the center’s opening in November, offering orthopedic services in sports and spine medicine and podiatry. This includes treatments for the hand, wrist, shoulder, elbow, hip, knee, ankle and foot. The center also has specialist sports medicine services and nonsurgical treatments such as injections (including ultrasound-guided shots), fracture care and casting, and care of sprains and strains, arthritis and wounds. Many of those services were previously dispersed at medical centers in Berlin, Montpelier and Waterbury, and patients would have to make multiple visits for complicated care or to access support services such as X-rays and lab testing.

Staff writer MONTPELIER — The iconic Bohemian Bakery is back after a relocation and transformation, much to the delight of its devoted followers. The bakery reopened Feb. 8 on Barre Street in the Capital City after closing last fall because it had outgrown its former home. Owners Robert Hunt and Annie Bakst wanted to reorganize and find a new site. The bakery first opened in 2003 in a 1835 farmstead in East Calais and quickly became a destination for foodies.

Staff writer What are the most promising jobs with the highest wages in Vermont in the next 10 years? Job seekers need look no further than Pathways to Promising Careers, a joint survey by the Burlington-based McClure Foundation and Vermont Department of Labor. The survey anticipates high demand in health care, education, technology, finance and the wood industry, with numerous job openings that pay $20 an hour or more. But there is one caveat: Many require training and education beyond high school. Statistics show that only 60 percent of Vermont high school students enroll in college within 16 months of graduating.

Staff writer MONTPELIER — Jonathan Herz is a master music maker with one foot in the past and one in the present. His musical boxes are a testament to the genius of Swiss timepieces that evolved into tuneful snuff boxes and chiming pocket watches with melody mechanisms in the 17th and 18th centuries. Their refinement led to precision cylinder musical boxes (different from a more conventional “music” box, which might be adorned with a dancing figure, or intended as a jewelry or storage box) made from 1860-’90, capable of playing orchestral scores of popular operetta and classical composers — a lost art that Herz has used 21st-century technology to revive. Cylinder musical boxes were some of the earliest examples of “recorded” music that would lead to the player piano and barrel organ. Then came the cylindrical disk polyphone, the precursor to Thomas Edison’s 1870 phonograph that allowed live music to be recorded and reproduced for the first time.

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COLCHESTER — News director and longtime Vermont Public Radio news reporter John Dillon will take on a new role as senior reporter for the New England News Collaborative beginning in January, VPR announced today.

WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — Stacey Chiocchio, a Grantham resident and community citizenship manager at Hypertherm, will be honored this week by the regional nonprofit Vital Communities as its 2017 volunteer of the year.